Reading Mathematics in Early Modern Europe

Studies in the Production, Collection, and Use of Mathematical Books

Philip Beeley, Yelda Nasifoglu, Benjamin Wardhaugh, Philip Beeley, Yelda Nasifoglu, Benjamin Wardhaugh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367609252
• eBook ISBN: 9781000207477
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Libraries and archives contain many thousands of early modern mathematical books, of which almost equally many bear readers' marks, ranging from deliberate annotations and accidental blots to corrections and underlinings. Such evidence provides us with the material and intellectual tools for exploring the nature of mathematical reading and the ways in which mathematics was disseminated and assimilated across different social milieus in the early centuries of print culture. Other evidence is important, too, as the case studies collected in the volume document. Scholarly correspondence can help us understand the motives and difficulties in producing new printed texts, library catalogues can illuminate collection practices, while manuscripts can teach us more about textual traditions. By defining and illuminating the distinctive world of early modern mathematical reading, the volume seeks to close the gap between the history of mathematics as a history of texts and history of mathematics as part of the broader history of human culture.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Did Euclid Prove Elements I, 1? The Early Modern Debate on Intersections and Continuity
• 2 Numbers and Paths: Henry Savile’s Manuscript Treatises on the Euclidean Theory of Proportion
• 3 Reading by Drawing. The Changing Nature of Mathematical Diagrams in Seventeenth-Century England
• 4 Interpreting Mathematical Error: Tycho’s Problematic Diagram and Readers’ Responses
• 5 Reading Mathematics in the English Collegiate–Humanist Universities
• 6 Tutor, Antiquarian, and Almost a Practitioner: Brian Twyne’s Readings of Mathematics
• 7 The Origin and Development of the Savilian Library
• 8 ‘A designe Inchoate’. Edward Bernard’s Planned Edition of Euclid and Its Scholarly Afterlife in Late Seventeenth-Century Oxford
• 9 ‘The Admonitions of a Good-Natured Reader’: Marks of Use in Georgian Mathematical Textbooks
• 10 Instrumental Reading: Towards a Typology of Use in Early Modern Practical Mathematics Texts
• 11 ‘Several Choice Collections’ in Geometry, Astronomy, and Chronology: Using and Collecting Mathematics in Early Modern England
• Bibliography
• Index